Jazz, Monster Collector in: The Lizard Wears Black (Season 1, Episodes 10 & 11) Read online

small mace. This was a favorite weapon of the Draconian army Black Sect—an elite force that was supposedly long defunct.

  Dracs were strong, but I was good. I flicked one of the throwing darts from my sleeve and stuck it in the scale-less palm of the lizard’s hand.

  “Ssssss!” With a cry he dropped the emitter, wrung its injured hand, and then yanked the dart free. He drew the steel whip back to strike just as my inter-dimensional snare rolled into its big, three clawed foot. He glanced down at the beeping snare, then back at me. I already had my MacDaddy revolver aimed it at his head.

  “The portal will open in six seconds. If you try to shut it down I’ll blow a hole in your scaly head.”

  He glanced back down, judging, I thought, if it could deactivate the snare before I could shoot. The drac dropped the whip, letting it pile up with a chilling sound of rattling chains, and crossed its arms. “So what,” he hissed defiantly.

  That was unexpected.

  “Open the rift and we’ll both be sucked through. I don’t care. It would be an honorable sacrifice as long as you go too.”

  Definitely Black Sect, the most immoral and ruthless of all the Draconian divisions. I shot him because I was even more ruthless than he.

  He cried out in a gurgling, screeching wail, and fell back on the floor, clutching his bleeding tail.

  I leapt forward, deactivated the inter-dimensional snare, and landed on top of him with my pistol barrel inserted partway up his left nostril. “I guess I don’t have to tell you that you’re dying, Godzuki.”

  “No,” he hissed through an apparent wave of pain, squeezing its bulbous eyes shut.

  “The hole I drilled in your tail artery says different. Tell me where the pureblood is and I’ll take you to it and let it heal you before I saw its dragon head off.”

  “No,” he hissed weakly, shaking its big head despite the position of my pistol. His eyes fluttered and dropped half-lidded. Dracs were really tough, partly because of all their redundant circulatory and respiratory systems, but this crud seemed to be fading fast. I may have misjudged him.

  Then his big, black eyes snapped open, his mouth opened into a vast gorge, and he roared.

  “Oh sh—” was all I got out before he hit me with his ridged, muscular tail. I vaguely recall a bright flash of pain, the sensation of flying, and then the sound of a human body breaking.

  The next thing I remembered was a terrible, awful stink, a regular bouncing, and pain, lots of pain.

  “Hey! Hey!” I shouted and pounded my fists against the thick back of some big beastie that had me draped over its shoulder. I pushed uselessly against the strong arm pressed across my back. “Let go, you crud!”

  With a suddenness that jarred my face into its stinking, hairy back, the beastie came to an abrupt stop. Before I could react it dumped me onto the ground and pressed a huge, hairy paw to my mouth.

  Mickey drew his ugly face closer to mine and set a long finger over his thick lips. “Shhhh.”

  Frankly I was more than a little freaked just then. I tried to push the paw aside and get on my feet but the big foot held me tight.

  “Shhh.”

  That’s when Parry’s face appeared beside Mickey’s. “Jazz,” he whispered. “Jazz, relax. You need to be quiet.”

  I did relax, and felt my brow wrinkle with deep grooves of confusion. I smelled dank earth and saw gloom all round. A mallow light glowed with a dim, gold-green light behind Mickey’s head, who stood stooped in the short tunnel. But my confusion was only partly from my location, and largely from Parry’s presence there. My secretary was not one to venture into the dark recesses of the planet.

  Parry looked up and down the tunnel, then back at me and forced on a small smile. “We’re safe..ish here, but only if we’re quiet.”

  I stuck out my tongue and blew hard, making a loud raspberry against Mickey’s paw, which, by the way, tasted terrible.

  “Ewe,” Mickey said, yanked his paw away and wiped it on his filthy trench coat. “That’s disgusting.”

  I took a deep breath and braced for the inevitable pain, and then pushed myself up into a sitting position against the dirt wall behind me. I wasn’t nearly prepared enough for the sharp pain that riddled my battered body. I felt like I’d been hurled against a wall by a super-strong micro-dragon, but then of course, I had.

  I looked up and down the long, dim tunnel and saw neither light nor an end in either direction. “Where are we?” my voice echoed several times.

  “Shhh,” Parry blew out in an annoyed hiss. “Keep your voice down.”

  I looked at Mickey who nodded his agreement with my easily rattled and overly cautious secretary. I raised a hand in request for assistance. Mickey grabbed me by the straps of my rucksack and effortlessly stood me up.

  I decided to give the non-violent approach a try for a change. “So why am I in a tunnel exactly?”

  “That’s what I keep asking,” Parry practically growled the words through his teeth.

  Mickey nodded a direction. “We’re following the lizard.”

  Maybe I was a little concussed, but these two weren’t building my confidence in the non-violent tactic. I decided to give it one more chance. I narrowed my eyes and let the tension in my lips express my growing impatience.

  Parry pointed at Mickey. “Don’t ask me, it was his idea.”

  Mickey couldn’t straighten up fully in the small space. He shifted around like he was trying to get comfortable. “We heard the confrontation in the shop, but waited outside like you said until we saw the drac stumble out bleeding. We ran in, you was knocked out cold. You wasn’t exactly in a condition for discussion, so I grabbed you and headed after the lizard.”

  “Last time I ask nice: where are we?”

  Mickey looked up like he could see through the ceiling and I wasn’t positive that he couldn’t. “Somewhere underneath the Loport tenements I figure. We’re heading due west…I think, and down, definitely down.”

  I peered down the tunnel. My shadow sight, an effect of a childhood accident, allowed me to see in all but total darkness. “You sure you’re still on his tail…figuratively?”

  Mickey sniffed in hard through that flat, wide nose of his. “Yeah.”

  “You can smell his trail?” I asked trying to not sound impressed.

  “Nah, not really,” Mickey said in his baritone voice. Then he pointed at the ground. “But you’ve got him leaking pretty good. He’s leaving—”

  “No,” Parry snapped and held up a hand. “Don’t even say it.”

  Mickey rolled his big, brown eyes. “He’s leaving enough to behind to follow.”

  Parry couldn’t stand the word blood let alone the sight of it.

  “Lead on, Mickey,” I said.

  “Shh,” Parry was shushing us so often that I suspected he’d sprung a leak of his own.

  I followed close behind the big beastie, keeping my eyes peeled as I could almost certainly see better than him in the dark, but I didn’t want him to know that. I try to keep my advantages, advantages. “Where does this start?”

  Mickey kept looking down, then behind us as we walked, occasionally stopping to listen. Apparently he wasn’t anymore comfortable underground than me. “We went in through the false back of a walk-in cooler in the Sauté Jurassic Restaurant.”

  “Ahh,” I said acknowledging the troglodyte owned eatery. I felt my eyebrows rise. “And the trogs just let you walk in.”

  Parry raised both hands and waved an open hand toward each of us. “No, don’t remind me, please,” he whispered.

  “Troglodytes ain’t put together so well,” Mickey said and looked a little embarrassed about it. “They kind of come apart if you pull at them.”

  One of Parry’s hands shot to his mouth and I’d speculate that his brown complexion turned a deep shade of green, except the self-same childhood accident had also rendered me completely color blind. “I told you not to say it,” he said a little too loudly.

  “Shhh,” Mickey a
nd I hissed together.

  I shot Mickey a sideways glance. “You know, you’re not so bad for a—”

  Mickey leaned back and glared down at me from beneath his protruding brow, apparently warning me against using the ‘monster’ slur.

  “Lead on Mickey of Earth,” I said, deciding to let this monster vs. Earthling debate of ours go for the moment.

  Mickey lead us to a T intersection, then, after a quick examination of the ground, turned right and, walking on his forepaws like a great ape, increased his speed. Now I can move fast for my five-foot, five-inch stature, but I really had to push it to keep up with him. If he wasn’t being careful to keep his artificial metal foot quiet, I might have had to jog to keep up.

  Behind me, Parry was almost at a run.

  Watching Mickey move on all fours was reminding me more and more of the big primates of old Earth. After the ID war, or, as everyone else called it, inter-dimensional integration, and before creation of the ID Bridge, the parallel Earth’s had been riddled with numerous cross dimensional portals, and species from both worlds poured though. Regrettably, the animals of old Earth were no match for the terrible abominations from the other side. Now, except for rats, cockroaches, and porcupines, there’re very few species left in any great numbers.

  Mickey proclaimed he wasn’t a monster, that he was, in fact, a true to life sasquatch, the last of his kind. My brain screamed no way, there was no such thing as big foot, but my gut was beginning to believe him. One thing I could be certain of though, he was evil. I knew because he was in the employ of a mobster named